Rackspace hands over keys to OpenStack Foundation

The day the vendors were waiting for – Rackspace steps aside from the infrastructure project, leaving the vendors to continue the success of OpenStack

With the much-anticipated Folsom
release just one week away, Rackspace have finalised relinquishing
their control of the cloud platform to the OpenStack
Foundation.

It’s a symbolic day for anyone connected with OpenStack, as
all the code and intellectual properties now fall into the hands of
the rapidly expanding collective.The newly-formed
foundation has launched with an initial $10m, donated by its
founding members, to fund development and marketing
efforts.

According to Rackspace, the initial goal had always been to
create “an open and ubiquitous platform for public and
private clouds,” that would obtain the
backing of some of the industry’s biggest cloud infrastructure
players. And by looking at the stats (850 organisations and 5,600
individuals pledging allegiance) and the names signed up such as
Red Hat, IBM, HP and VMware (amongst others), it seems that
Rackspace are bowing out with their heads held high.

In fact, this move had been in the works for over a year,
after Rackspace’s
initial announcementin October 2011. The other
founding member of the initiative, NASA,stepped
aside back in May, suggesting that the role of the
two creators was reaching its end.

Rackspace’s drive to create such a thriving community around
the project cannot be understated,however, and rightly deserves to be commended. Just over two
years after its inception, half a million lines of code have been
contributed to OpenStack, whilstthesoftware has been downloaded more than 300,000 times from the
central repositories.

The next release, Folsom, is almost ready to
go, with deployability improvements, security
enhancements and an updated dashboard. The biggest challenge
however for Folsom is the inclusion of the incubating Networking
(Quantum) and Block Storage (Cinder) projects, splitting from the
larger Compute (Node) to allow for greater
flexibility.

Any new direction in OpenStack’s roadmap will become apparent
from the Grizzly design summit in October, with the release itself
planned for April 2013. We can expectCeilometer(providing
metering) andHeat(responsible for basic cloud orchestration) somewhere down
the line,though.

Whilst Rackspace won’t desert the project entirely (they’ve
built their private and public clouds on it, after
all), governance now falls solely down to the
community – as it should be if OpenStack wants to reach the lofty
but now attainable goal of becoming the Linux for Cloud.